The Internet is a worldwide system of interconnected computer networks that transmits data. Various information and services are carried via the Internet, such as electronic mail (e-mail), online chat rooms, and the World Wide Web (the Web). In particular, the Web is an information space in which online documents called web pages are stored and published for the entire computing world to access. Anyone connected to the Internet can view the myriad of web pages available online by accessing global identifiers called Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). Once a user accesses a URI, the user's Internet browser retrieves the web page associated with the URI and displays it on the user's computing device.
Search engines are popular tools for browsing the myriad of web pages on the Web without knowledge of specific URIs. For example, MSN®, Yahoo!®, Google® are some popular search engines on the Web due to their ability to locate web pages associated with search terms. Once a query is initiated by submitting search terms, a search engine returns a list of hyperlinks to web pages that are related to the search terms. Textual excerpts of relevant portions of the related web pages may also be listed along with the hyperlink. However, the user must eventually select the hyperlinks to view any of the actual web pages. Consequently, the user is left with the tedious task of clicking through multiple hyperlinks to locate a web page containing what he/she is looking for. This can be very time consuming, since search engines frequently list web pages that do not accurately match query terms and some terms may have multiple meanings.
Conventional search engines are now beginning to display a thumbnail image only for some web pages listed in the results of a search-engine query. The reason thumbnails for some web pages are generated while others are not is two fold. First, the thumbnails are generated by web crawlers that are constantly indexing web pages on the Web. These generated thumbnails are stored on servers owned by the search engine and updated only periodically. Because web crawlers cannot search and index every web page available on the Internet, only a limited number of thumbnails are stored. Second, the capacity needed to store thumbnails of every available web page is enormous. Storing a thumbnail of every web page would be a terrible waste of storage. In addition, web pages are constantly changing, so a thumbnail of a web page when a web crawler first locates it may be stale by the time a user queries for it.